BBC World News

Jason Elliot

English writer and photographer Jason Elliot went to Afghanistan in the 1980s at the age of 19 to live with the Afghan resistance, or mujahideen.

Here he looks back on the chaos of combat and reflects on how a patriotic cause became embroiled in foreign ideology.

Jason Elliot was 19 when he first went to Afghanistan

I had arrived at a mujahideen headquarters at a tiny little ravine on our route towards Kabul from the Pakistani border.

One of the men had been injured after stepping on a landmine. The commander gave me a shawl the injured man had been wearing and told me I could wash it. It was soaked in his blood but I just saw a dirty shawl. I put it in the river, pushed the fabric down and saw the water turn red.

It was a defining moment - I realised this was the blood of a real man and he was dying at that moment on the donkey at the end of the path.

All talk of front lines, of decisive battles, trenches and advances, of supply columns and medical aid was nonsense. Sometimes battles erupted for no apparent reason.

There would be blissful days of peace and tranquillity and suddenly a missile landed in the village and people you were close to got killed. There was a randomness, a terrifying capriciousness to the conflict.

For most mujahideen groups, the war was a very local affair. They were content with attacking local Soviet and Afghan military positions and then going home.


The local military post would often launch attacks just to intimidate and harass the local population

The group I was with would go out at night to go and shoot up a military encampment full of mostly Afghan troops, not Soviets.

We would come back, then join another local group and shoot up one where the Soviets were.

The strategic value of these operations was limited but, equally, it seemed the same randomness was exercised at the other end.

The local military post would often launch attacks just to intimidate and harass the local population.

At night, I would feel a strange sense of longing as I looked to the hills over Kabul and saw this ragged line of peaks lit up every few seconds by bombardment.

The extremes of danger are very close to extremes of hilarity. I remember once our group was attacked as we were walking back from an operation on a moonlit night.

Suddenly the world exploded with machine-gun fire. The trees above our heads were being torn apart. I had never experienced gunfire before and didn't know how to react. It was more like witnessing a dream.

An Afghan friend dragged me to where the others had huddled as the bullets smacked off these rocks. There were all shaking, but not with terror - they were in fits of laughter. They were giggling, clutching their stomachs in paroxysms of laughter at the hilarity of being shot at. Later, I started laughing, too.

You began to see Arab fighters in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s.

Unlike the Afghans, who were defending their homeland, the Arabs' motives for fighting were more political than personal. Their arrival marked the point where the war began to lose its innocence.

The Arab fighters I met lacked the hospitality, civility, gentleness and tremendous light-heartedness of the Afghans.

Some Afghan mujahideen groups wanted nothing to do with them. Others accepted them. Others were obliged to accept them because they, of course, could provide resources.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

It is interesting to see his condemnation of the Arab fighters involved in the war, and that their only interest in joining the battle was merely political. Osama bin Laden is certainly no hero in many Afghan eyes, and certainly should not be. I personally think that it is he, and not necessarily the Soviets, who is at the root of all of that nation's problems for the past two and a half decades.

Not that war can be innocent, but it can certainly be argued that OBL and his coherts certainly made things worse in long run for Afghanistan. By securing a mujahideen victory, things fell in place to eventually to establish a harsh theocracy dominated by his cronies and not helping the nation any more than Soviet dominance would have. I seriously doubt that the USSR would have been able to hold onto Afghanistan post-1989 collapse.

Who knows? Think of how the world may have been different.

From a Soviet Soldier:

Vladimir Grigoryev

Soviet forces brought with them their own interpreters. Former 2nd Lt Vladimir Grigoryev, a student of Farsi at Leningrad State University, served in Afghanistan for two years.

Returning home to Russia, he long tried to forget the experience but ended up creating a website for modern war literature - artofwar.ru - which he describes as "almost medical" in its cathartic role for veterans.

Grigoryev (right) is seen here with comrades both killed soon after

I came back in August 1987 after serving exactly two years and I virtually erased the word Afghanistan from my life and memory for 10 years. Not deliberately, by the way - it was just some internal defence mechanism kicking in. I had practically no contact with "Afghans" [Soviet veterans] in St Petersburg.

The popular image of the Afghan veteran has changed greatly over the years - from a kind of Rambo figure fighting for justice to a modern Russian gangster. With this recent drive to inspire military patriotism, "Afghans" have become positive role models again.

You could say I was a volunteer. I had feelings of romance and patriotism - however absurd that may sound now, unfortunately - which had been fostered in me since childhood.

When I was joining the army the newspapers would write things like: "Our soldiers suddenly ran into a gang of bandits during field manoeuvres" but when I came back everyone knew it was a real war and "Afghans" were treated as heroes.


It was our duty to our comrades and to our families to get home alive

Afghanistan is a fabulously beautiful country and that could not fail to reflect on its people.

For the first six months, I had close contact with Afghans as a member of a propaganda unit, driving around mountain villages to hand out food and fuel and show films. We got on well and whenever we were coming up to a village with mujahideen in it, they would start to shoot over our heads and we would turn around and head off.

For the next year and a half, I saw practically no Afghan civilians. Our regiment's units were fighting nearly all the time in the mountains and we could never really relax during the quiet periods.

Few believed in the fairy tale about "international duty". We were defending ourselves and our comrades - it was our duty to them and to our families to get home alive. Not everybody made it.

I would say to any Afghan: forgive us, brother, but we were obeying orders. Soldiers everywhere know what the military oath means. We were on duty.

After 9/11, I wrote booklets on how to behave in Afghanistan at the request of parents of American soldiers of Russian extraction. I don't mean to sound like a prophet of gloom but Soviet soldiers saw their worst fighting five years after the invasion. Draw your own conclusions.

The artofwar website is one for the authors rather than the readers, strange to say. They need to express themselves and then discuss their writings with fellow veterans. You might call it a medical site except that, well, the authors are not sick and their works are also available in print.

From a teacher with a different (and probably more accurate) viewpoint than my own. I would agree that the invasion signalled a downward spiral for Afghanistan, but I would say that OBL's involvement made the situation that much worse.


Gelalei Habib

Afghan teacher Gelalei Habib was already living in fear of the communist regime when the USSR invaded her country 25 years ago. The disappearance of her little sister still haunts her.

Gelalei Habib blames her country's woes on the communist years
During the [communist] government of Hafizullah Amin, I was an elementary school teacher and besides my normal job, I had some political activities too.

One day I was at work when the agents from the interior ministry raided my home and searched everywhere. They seized my books. I was not there so they took my 13-year-old sister with them.

When I heard this news I realised that my life was in danger. I never went back to my house. I had to live secretly with my husband and two kids after that.

A very difficult period started in our life: we had to go from one home to another for more than three months. We were staying with our friends and relatives during this time.

I was worried for my sister Badrieh more than I was worried for myself. I did not know her whereabouts or what had happened to her. We have never been able to find her to this date. This is the most terrible bereavement in my life.

Sometimes I wish all the women in Afghanistan could remove their veils and I could see their faces - maybe I could find my sister among them?

When we were displaced we listened to the news every day just hoping to get good news, but on 27 December [1979] we heard that our country had been occupied by foreign forces.

People were shocked to hear this for some time, but soon the resistance started. The Soviet forces were everywhere. They first controlled the country peacefully but when they saw the resistance, they intensified their crackdown.

One of the ways people used to fight the foreign forces was to go up on the roof and chant God Is Great. The Soviet soldiers used to shoot at them.

I think the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan, together with the [April 1978 communist] coup, was the source for all the miseries of the Afghan people who are seeing its consequences even today.

There is no family who, during this period, did not lose a relative or had someone maimed. I remained in Afghanistan for all this period. I continued to teach the children how to read and write privately, until the day that I could get back to my work.

From a commanding Soviet Officer:

Karl Paks

Capt Karl Paks spent much of his career clearing World War II mines in Russia, but the Afghan war saw the Estonian sapper laying new ones as a Soviet paratroop officer.

He now campaigns for Afghan War veterans' rights in independent Estonia and hopes to commemorate local war dead with a monument in Tallinn.

Estonian sappers like Karl Paks are serving in Afghanistan once again
I was 37 when I arrived as an officer with the 103rd Airborne Division. I served from July 1987 to January 1989 and was based at Bagram airbase outside Kabul.

Major military operations had ended long before but the roads were no less dangerous.

In the autumn of 1988, our sapper battalion had orders to clear away all destroyed vehicles between Kabul and Bagram. We brought them in and piled them up but a week later there were just as many burnt, burning or smouldering vehicles along the road.

Before that, I had been stationed with the 76th Airborne in Pskov [north-west Russia] for 13 and a half years. I know that I personally disarmed around 3,500 wartime munitions in the Pskov region.

We did not keep count of the number of mines we cleared in Afghanistan. We spent half the time laying them and the other half clearing them. We would go ahead of the convoys, for instance, to check the roads. They say Afghanistan is the most mined country in the world.

Our tour of duty ended on 21 January 1989. There were four or five of us and we were walking through Termez [on the Soviet side of the border] when suddenly we all burst out laughing. It was eight o'clock in the evening, it was the south and we had realised that we were walking through a town without our guns, helmets or flak jackets. That is when it hit us that our war was over.

The proposed Estonian monument is named the Millstone of War

The stress would only show when you went home. You come home from the war and you see civilians going about their normal lives, and then some people get into a quarrel over some minor thing and you feel this anger welling up inside you. You feel like saying: "Why are you arguing over nothing? Do have any idea what it means to be alive?"

Worst affected were the youngsters in the special forces, who were always on combat missions. They would come back home physically intact but crippled psychologically. They are grown men now, but when they start to remember the war, they can go on drinking bouts lasting two or three weeks to drown out the stress inside them.

Estonian military records show that 1,652 local soldiers, both ethnic Estonians and Russians, served in Afghanistan. Sixteen Estonians and at least 22 Russians were killed.

Unfortunately, our Afghan veterans enjoy no special status, unlike the Estonian soldiers now serving in Iraq whose welfare is protected by new legislation. In Afghanistan, we were carrying out orders and one of the aims of our veterans' organisation, Relvavendlus [Brothers in Arms], is to obtain equal legal status.

We have had promises of help from district officials here in Tallinn to erect a war monument and I hope it will be up by 2006. The general opinion here seems to be that Afghanistan is an undeservedly forgotten page in Estonia's history.

There is, incidentally, a unit of Estonian sappers now serving with the international peacekeeping forces in Afghanistan.

Nafisakhon Akhadova

Uzbek mother Nafisakhon Akhadova's son, a child she had longed for all her life, was killed serving with the Soviet military during the war.

Nafisakhon Akhadova came home from work to her son's coffin

I am from a village in Fergana district in Uzbekistan. It was my fate in life to have 10 children who died when they were very small. My eleventh child was a boy and he was killed in Afghanistan.

He went off to do his military service in 1985. After eight months they sent him home to me in a sealed zinc coffin.

I begged them to let me open the coffin but they said I was not allowed to. But I insisted and eventually after I had asked them so many times, they gave in and allowed me to see him, but just his face, nothing more.

I touched his face. You could see the wounds. He had scars around his eyes. It was really only at the moment that I understood that he was gone forever.

Afterwards they told me what had happened to him. He was a medic and he had been in the hospital treating a patient. He had just started bandaging someone when the mujahideen attacked. There were 17 patients in the hospital. They killed them all, and my son with them.

Some reinforcements were sent in to help them but they arrived too late. If they had been there just five minutes earlier my son might still have been alive today.

I was at work when I got the news. By the time I got home they had already brought the coffin. I just did not know what to do with myself.

Allah gave me a son and Allah took him away. What can you do? I still grieve for him.

A refugee:

Somaya

Afghan refugee Somaya recalls her family's precarious existence in neighbouring Iran as a result of the invasion.

She fears that returning home now, after 20 years, would mean having to start again from scratch.

I am 23-years-old and I have lived in Iran for nearly 20 years.

Somaya is one of five million Afghan refugees from the war
When we first came to Iran, I was four. That was after the Russians invaded Afghanistan. My father told me that the Russians had killed many people, they put many people in prison - basically, our country was occupied by Russians. We were forced to leave.

We tried to cross the border into Iran illegally but we were captured in the middle of the night and sent to a refugee camp.

For a long time, we lived in different camps. Our only possession was a tent, which was hot in summer and cold in winter. Finally, an Iranian man helped us to settle in Masshad, in north-east Iran. But still, our lives were difficult.

My father had been an engineer in Afghanistan and we hoped that he would find a nice job here in Iran but we realised that Afghans were not allowed to work here.

My father was forced to work as a labourer on a building site. Then he worked as a shoemaker in a basement and he could only make enough money to pay the rent and feed us once a day.

The way Iranians treated us made us hate being Afghans. I hid my nationality at school so that I could make some friends. It was very difficult for me to see my other friends, who were better off than I was. We all lived in a damp basement.

My only joy in life was my studies. In all of these years, we were scared that we would be thrown out of the country because the threat was always there from the authorities. We lived with these difficulties in the hope that one day we would return.

But now, three years after the new government in Afghanistan, I still do not want to go back. People there do not even have the basic requirements to live. If we returned, we would have to start from scratch and go through everything we went through in Iran, all over again.

A nurse on the front:

Sanobar Tursunova

Sanobar Tursunova served as a nurse at a Soviet hospital during the war and she recalls the flood of casualties, often with horrific injuries, arriving in Termez, Uzbekistan.

Scores of wounded arrived every day, Sanobar Tursunova recalls
During the war I was working in the infectious diseases ward in the local hospital. We had lots of soldiers who were suffering from hepatitis and meningitis.

When we came off shift we used to help out in the surgical ward too. I remember one particular case when they brought in a group of 15 soldiers who had all been badly burned - they had all been sharing the same tent. Their burns were so bad that you could not even make out their faces properly. Two of them died but the rest survived.

Every day they would bring in about 40 or 50 wounded soldiers. There were many more dead bodies. So many that the morgue was completely full most of the time.

One of our patients was a teacher from Dushanbe in [the Soviet republic of] Tajikistan. He had been working in Afghanistan as a translator. He had got caught up in a bombing raid and part of his skull had been blown away by shrapnel. He was operated on but he died three days later.

Lots of lads were brought in with their hands or feet blown off. Some of them would tell us that they had deliberately blown off their own limbs because they were so frightened. They were happy because they knew they would be going home.

You know, even the soldiers who had the most terrible injuries were really happy that at least they were still alive. Even the ones who were so badly burned that there was hardly a single patch of skin left on their bodies.

I cannot tell you how absolutely awful it all was. But you know, one thing: at least in those days we had enough medical supplies and we were able to help all our wounded patients.

Omar Nessar

Omar Nessar was a schoolboy from an academic family in Kabul when Soviet forces invaded and he vividly remembers how the war haunted his childhood. Now living in Moscow, he edits a website serving Russia's large Afghan community - afghanistan.ru.

Omar Nessar is one of 150,000 Afghans living in Russia
I was about six or seven and I remember it was the start of the new school year and I was astonished to see a portrait on the first page of the schoolbooks of a man I had never heard of before: [short-lived Afghan President] Nur Mohammed Taraki.

One day on my way to school I saw a column of Soviet tanks. Soldiers sat on the turrets smiling at passers-by while children stood looking at them out of curiosity.

That evening, the TV showed people greeting Soviet tanks entering Kabul with flowers. I think many people first reacted to the invasion either positively or neutrally. I remember people saying that the Soviets had come for two or three years, after which they would leave Afghanistan.

My father worked in the education ministry and my mum taught at Kabul University. Like many Afghan families, our relatives ended up on different sides of the front.

While my mum was never a party member most of her relatives held fairly high posts in the party and the government. Father was a rank-and-file member of the [ruling] People's Democratic Party although most of his family joined the mujahideen after the invasion and left for Pakistan.


Many people of my age remember those years with nostalgia

My father began by believing enthusiastically in the "Revolution" but gradually, like many others, became frustrated at the presence of Soviet advisers in the ministry. I recall how he would come home in the evening and complain that the advisers at times insisted on a say in everything and anything which did not concern them.

I well remember how often the whole family would go out of the city for picnics, like to Paghman or to the country house of our relatives, which the Soviets later turned into an observation post.

After the invasion, I was never back there and I asked my parents for a long time why we never went to my beloved Paghman. They always told me it was too dangerous and I did not understand why.

I have to say that I and many people of my age remember those years with nostalgia because the mujahideen did not meet the hopes of the people after the Soviet withdrawal.

Under the communists, Kabul was a beautiful city with a well-developed infrastructure. Such things as drinking water, 24-hour power supplies, telephones, working schools, universities, hospitals and public transport are now considered a luxury there.

The Russian government's policy towards Afghanistan in the 1990s is inexplicable. We all now know that Moscow even held talks with [pro-Soviet Afghan leader Mohammed] Najibullah's enemies. Russia dug the grave of its own ally.

Many Afghans, former officers and party members, came to Russia in the hope of finding refuge but unfortunately their hopes were not realised and even former senior politicians were left to fend for themselves. But Afghans now living in Russia do not harbour any grudge against the people of Russia.

The vast majority of Afghans living in Moscow believe in Afghanistan's future and are happy, on the whole, with Hamid Karzai's policies. Every week, hundreds of Afghans make use of the restored direct air link between Moscow and Kabul to visit the old country

No thoughts on any of these?

In all honesty, you gave us WAY too much to read at once.

Now I wouldn't do THAT would I?

I can be a dork sometimes!

So much info, and no bolding...

*overwhelmed with all the posts*

Not you too IEB!